The Estuary balances a panoramic spatial rhythm with an understated emotional resonance. In this intriguing composition, Lowry turns his gaze to a small Lancashire estuary town caught in a moment of flux. The receding tide exposes a network of fleeting pathways and open spaces where crowds wander freely – soon to vanish once more beneath the natural landscape and fresh sea air of the estuary, with their movement across the foreground mirroring the ebb and flow of the estuarine waters beyond.
Painted the year after his celebrated 1943 July, The Seaside, (The Arts Council Collection), The Estuary depicts ordinary, working class families attempting to continue their daily summertime activities as Britain approached the final year of war. The rich, thickly applied impasto, synonymous with Lowry’s painting during World War II, is magnificently on display in this canvas. The figures in the foreground are delineated with beautiful clarity, whereas those in the distance are sketched in to articulate the heat and haze of a summer’s day.
Lowry’s seascapes may seem a far cry from his renowned industrial scenes. The scholar Michael Howard has, however, commented on the Arts Council’s July, The Seaside:
The figures walk and occupy themselves as they would in any of his urban scenes. It is in these compositions that he comes closest to the crowded but immaculately considered canvases of Brueghel…His scenes celebrate the landscape of discreet holidaying, a world away from the noisy, vulgar realities of Blackpool Pleasure Beach, for example, and suggests the more tranquil, gentler resorts a few miles further south of that centre of robust liberality and licence. Despite Lowry’s alleged liking for fairgrounds, these highly visible aspects of seaside resorts are transposed into scenes of ordered behaviour. (M.Howard, L.S. Lowry, A Visionary Artist, 2000, p.226)
The present work in many ways exemplifies Howard’s argument. The Estuary was painted at a pivotal moment of transition for Lowry, who, having served on fire-watch duty in Manchester during the Second World War, began to turn his attention away from the city towards the coast and countryside. He swapped the urban characters populating his city studies into his seaside scenes. The Estuary recalls Lowry’s urban works from the 1920s and 1930s where city residents go about their daily routines, with children playing, couples strolling, and groups talking among themselves.
Lefevre Gallery, London Mr P.J. Liddell sale, Sotheby’s, London 01.05.1968, lot 76 Crane Kalman Gallery, London, June 1995 Private Collection, UK Private Collection, UK
London, Crane Kalman Gallery, L.S. Lowry: a selection of 36 paintings, November – December 1975, no. 14 Pre-sale exhibition, Christie’s London, June 2017
